EXCLUSIVE: Yahoo Genome Mastermind Freedman on Joining Nativo

ADOTAS — Jay Freedman, former VP of Yahoo, will be joining the ranks of native ad company Nativo as the company’s first Chief Revenue Officer. This decision by Nativo highlights added emphasis towards top-line growth and building a scalable company. And it’s a smart move since native advertising is white hot right now, with some fierce competition from players like Sharethrough and Zumobi.

Most recently Freedman led the tech and telecom vertical at Yahoo. According to a press release, he worked closely with advertisers like AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile and Samsung. Prior, he led the launch of Yahoo’s Genome platform, a self-service audience buying solution that gives advertisers a holistic view of consumers for more effective targeting and ad delivery.

“I joined Nativo to advance the next stage of digital advertising,” said Freedman. “Native advertising is the future, and Nativo has built a superior technology to power the category. For brand advertisers, we bring massive scale to their content marketing efforts while unlocking a new revenue stream for publishers, particularly in mobile. Nativo is hyper-focused on building the most advanced native technology, making it easy for publishers to activate and manage native across all site and device types, and for advertisers to deploy native campaigns at scale within minutes. Nativo is leading the way in the category, so the opportunity to join the team and accelerate that growth was a natural fit for me. It was an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up.”

Asked why this move is significant to him, Freedman exclusively told Adotas, “For me, I’ve always been most comfortable in a thriving start-up culture with a highly compelling, valuable and well-timed product offering. Nativo provided me the opportunity to return to that exact environment – to join an already strong leadership team with a ton of traction on both sides of the business. For Nativo, I bring veteran sales leadership, an immediate New York presence, experience building out a first-class sales organization to further educate and establish our product offering with leading advertisers and agencies, and a proven track record of driving transformative revenue growth.”

Freedman will be working alongside Nativo CEO Justin Choi to help both marketers and publishers scale native ad initiatives.

“In the first few months at his post, Jay will be working to build the sales efforts on behalf of Nativo in New York City, spreading the word about Nativo to advertisers, expanding the company’s profile among big players in New York, and building a killer sales team for Nativo,” said Choi. “The first 30-90 days will focus on diving into the marketplace, making a very clear distinction between Nativo and what others are calling native. Outreach to key clients and agencies will help educate them on the native category, why it matters to their overall strategy and where native should fit in the media mix to maximize their ROI.”

As I’ve written about in several stories, the future of mobile is undoubtedly native. Choi added, “Nearly 50 percent of all consumer web activity happens via mobile today, and responsive design is where more and more publishers are taking the user experience. There is no room for interruptive ad formats in these kinds of clean, elegant environments, and with the IAB reporting +145% year-over-year growth in mobile spend, native will be the key delivery engine powering mobile ad executions. With content streams dominating the way content is consumed in mobile, native is the perfect vehicle to deliver valuable brand content that’s truly seamless and organic to the user experience.”

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Richard L. Tso is a reporter for Adotas and an avid writer covering the intersection of technology and advertising, fashion and music. With over 12 years of experience in the Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations industries, Richard has held executive positions at global agencies and technology companies and is founder of the interactive communications firm Pseudosound Consulting LLC. A classical cellist and painter, he believes that sometimes sound carries more weight than words. He is a graduate of Stanford University.